Fiona Shepherd interviews Tony-winning singersongwriter Anaïs Mitchell ahead of her Celtic Connections gig
After the rigours of her Broadway hit Hadestown, Tony-winning singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell talks to Fiona Shepherd about kicking back with new band Bonny Light Horseman at Celtic Connections to reinterpret British and Irish folk songs
It’s not often – or ever – that the Celtic Connections programme can boast a Tony Award-winner in its line-up. But this year, festival veteran Anaïs Mitchell returns to Scotland as the current big noise on Broadway with a brace of awards in her back pocket thanks to her folk opera Hadestown, a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set during the Great Depression.
Mitchell freely admits that Hadestown has consumed over a decade of her life, progressing from humble beginnings as a DIY community theatre project in her native Vermont to a concept album featuring the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Ani Difranco and the Haden Triplets before returning to the stage as a concert tour.
This incarnation of the show played at Celtic Connections nine years ago with Difranco joined by Martin Carthy as Hades, singer/ composer Iain Morrison as Orpheus and broadcaster Mary Ann Kennedy as narrator – “sort of like a radio novella,” says Mitchell. “It was a special scene.”
But things really hotted up in Hadestown when Mitchell teamed up with theatre director Rachel Chavkin and their beefed-up musical theatre version of the show progressed from off-broadway to actual Broadway last spring, where it went on to win eight Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Original Score.
“I could never have predicted that we would end up on Broadway, let alone winning any awards,” says Mitchell, “but I always felt like it wasn’t finished. It was like climbing a mountain and you think it’s the peak and you get there and there’s somewhere else to go.”
Having scaled the heights, Mitchell could have gone anywhere, and she did put some work in on another theatre concept before setting it to one side and heading off in the opposite direction with the intimacy and spontaneity of her latest project, an album and group called Bonny Light Horseman, named after an Irish lament from the Napoleonic Wars.
“I’m so thrilled to be just making music again right now,” she says. “I’ve been living in this single-minded state of passionate anxiety for as many years as I can remember – I didn’t realise the extent to which Hadestown and the theatre world was going to take over my creative life. This was the complete opposite. This is a bunch of Americans getting excited about traditional folk music from across the pond and trying to find a common language.”
Along with her bandmates Eric D Johnson, frontman of indie rockers Fruit Bats, and producer/ instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Mitchell reinterprets traditional British and Irish folk songs, from Lowlands to Blackwaterside, in blissed-out cosmic country style.
“I tend to really labour over my own songwriting and this project felt charmed,” she says. “I had a hard time trusting at the beginning that it could be good or beautiful if it was easy but I found myself really falling in love with it and part of it is that it’s not held too tightly. It’s music that we can inhabit but it’s never going to belong to us, it feels bigger than any of us. Because the material is so old, even the stuff that we are having our way with feels like water from a deep well. It’s a place to rest.”
Mitchell and her horsemen come to rest once more at Celtic Connections with two appearances – a full band show at the Old Fruitmarket and a more intimate songwriters’ circletype affair called Anaïs Mitchell’s Campfire at St Luke’s, where she warms her hands alongside Kris Drever, indie folk singer Rozi Plain and Mitchell’s fellow Vermont folkie Sam Amidon.
For all the contrast in scale with the razzmatazz of Broadway, this humble sharing of folk songs is part of a thread – that of the modern contextualisation of ancient traditions – which runs through all of Mitchell’s work from Hadestown, which presaged the Trump era on the song Why We Build the Wall ,toher collaboration with Brooklyn-based guitarist and songwriter Jefferson Hamer on their 2013 Child Ballads album, curating and arranging a selection of the Scottish and Engish ballads collected in the late 19th century by American scholar Francis James Child.
“With the Child Ballads project, we were really fascinated by the long and rambling narrative stories – a song like Willie’s Lady is an insane story with witches and spells,” says Mitchell. “This project is more impressionistic. I’ve always loved the song Bonny Light Horseman and a lot of the versions I’ve heard have a lot of military imagery in them – the cannons, the cavalry and Napoleon standing there. It felt enough for this version just to present the image of this young woman yearning to fly to the land where her beloved lies. We didn’t need all that heavy artillery.”
Mitchell was familiar with folk
“It’s music that we can inhabit but it’s never going to belong to us”
song from a young age thanks to her hippy parents’ collection of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez albums but her own personal gateway to the new oldfashioned tradition was the music of Gillian Welch, who has an uncanny ability to write of present struggles in a timeless lyrical and musical vernacular. Mitchell points to Welch’s
Ruination Day and its juxtaposition of Biblical imagery with mobile phones as a particular touchstone from her earliest days as a songwriter.
“Somehow that bringing together of the old and the new felt so compelling and healing at some level,” says Mitchell, “that anything we are going through, individually or as a society, has already been experienced and there’s a folk song about that or there’s a fairytale about that.
“As a writer you can get very uptight about some idea that you’re making this stuff up from scratch somehow, like you have to dredge it up as if you’re not standing on the backs of the ancestors, which we are. The truth is there’s only so many notes in the scale, only so many words in the language that are singable and there’s only so many stories. The real challenge is to retell them in a way that feels totally alive.”
Anaïs Mitchell and Bonny Light Horseman play the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow on 29 January and Anaïs Mitchell’s Campfire is at St Luke’s, Glasgow on 30 January. For more information see www. celticconnections.com. Bonny Light Horseman is out now on 37d03d